If you want to use a proper browser, consider Vivaldi. I was an avid user of Firefox up to a few years ago, until I read that Mozilla was going to team up with Soros. They did this to integrate into their browsers a real time fake news detector, which means that the likes of Soros and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar determine what is fake and what is not. That made me say goodbye to Firefox instantly. After that I used Opera for some time, but me being picky, the browser's sidebar lay-out annoyed the crap out of me. At some point it made me look for alternatives and I ran into Vivaldi. After finding this browser with a slim sidebar, I found that it has many more excellent features that I came to enjoy rather fast.
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| The Vivaldi logo |
Vivaldi was founded by now Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner, who was building browsers before most people knew what a browser was. He was also a co-founder of Opera before he started his own enterprise. So, he has many ideas based on experience and creativity about browser functionality, UI and appearance. Many of those are implemented in Vivaldi that is based on the open source Chromium engine. Now this engine is known to be a memory hog, but Vivaldi built its own core based on Chromium, resulting in the fact that Vivaldi is a lot faster, more feature rich and a lot more customizable than its adversaries, which are characteristics that many users appreciate.
Compared to its competition Vivaldi does very well. In this article it says there is no IOS version, which by now (August 2021) however, there is. Wired even stated in an article that if you're not using Vivaldi, You're probably not using the best web browser. Now, I am not a run of the mill mindless fan boy of anything, but I'm just posting this article based on my personal experience. If tomorrow a new and better browser would become available, I would most likely switch to it after testing it. However this, for the time being, seems unlikely in view the pace at which Vivaldi upgrades its innovative product, introducing bug fixes and adding functionality that often is not incorporated in other browsers.
Contrary to Mozilla, Vivaldi genuinely cares about user privacy and their freedom to decide for themselves what they want to read or have a look at. Mozilla has integrated MITI (Mozilla Information Trust Initiative) into its browser, that Mozilla claims to be an attempt to filter out disinformation. That means that Mozilla determines what disinformation is for you, which is nothing but sheer censorship, no matter what they say it is. Mozilla, the company that once took pride in being independent, has hereby taken a step that diametrically goes against everything it once stood for. As soon as I took notice of this swerve, I uninstalled Firefox.
It therefore makes sense that Vivaldi teamed up with Duckduckgo to ensure (provided you use the Duckduckgo plug-in however) that Google analytics does not record and store your every move on the web. This partnership with Duckduckgo is important to Vivaldi, because using this search engine generates a part of their income - each click represents a recompense that is transferred to their account and in the process prefers users to use the search engine that does not track users and the search parameters that they have entered.
I know, perfection is a state that continues to allude us, but it's a goal that many of us try to reach, even if often it turns out to be out of sight. But some just do a better job than others in pursuing it anyway. In the landscape of competing browsers I think Vivaldi is doing quite a good job when comparing it to its rivals. Browsing the web has become an important part of modern life, so the tool used for that purpose is equally important. If you want to decide for yourself what information you access, Vivaldi is among the options that lets you do just that.
